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ICANN Stacks Board with Non-Critical Appointees

Posted by michael on from the all-pretenses-of-public-input-eliminated dept.

Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. SOP by retto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't see how this could be a surprise because isn't this type of behaviour standard now for any kind of governing body in business? I thought that one of the major complaints about most modern board of directors is that they have long stopped operating in the public, or even their own company's or organization's, interests?

  2. Their authority comes from everyone by Sloppy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    They get their authority defacto from the people who choose to use the servers that they control. Does the resolver that you use, use their root servers? Then you're voting for ICANN.

    It's democracy, but almost all the voters are apathetic.

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  3. Noble effort, but still the wrong direction by Fastolfe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We need to start getting people away from using DNS as a locator service. DNS is meant (mainly) to apply convenient names to IP addresses, not so that my mom can guess "www.example.com" when she wants to know something about "example".

    DNS is inappropriate for this because it does not allow two parties with a legitimate interest in the same label to share it, except through the confusion of additional TLDs. Two parties could have a perfectly legal claim to a label that they now have to battle out in courts. A better solution would be to create a directory on top of DNS to map these real-world names to DNS domains. Put all of the trademark and IP crap you want into regulating this directory, but leave it out of DNS.

    LDAP or X.500 could do this nicely, with the added benefit of allowing distinguished names to include information about the locality (thus legal jurisdiction). This limits the scope of an IP conflict to the jurisdiction in question.

    If I want to load the home page for Example Widgets, I should just need to hunt for the common name "Example Widgets", pick the match that makes the most sense (assuming more than one match is found), and have my lookup return a DNS domain name. My browser would consult DNS for a SRV record associated with that domain, find a host providing HTTP services for it, and request the home page from that host. At no point should my mom ever need to be exposed to a hostname (or a URL for that matter).

    My two cents, anyway.